Alfresco Elements

Introducing Alfresco

Contents
Document information.............................................................................................................. 3 Introducing Alfresco................................................................................................................. 4

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Document information

Document information
Information in this document is subject to change without notice. No part of this document may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, for any purpose, without the express written permission of Alfresco. The trademarks, service marks, logos, or other intellectual property rights or Alfresco and others used in this documentation("Trademarks") are the property of Alfresco and their respective owners. The furnishing of this document does not give you license to these patents, trademarks, copyrights or other intellectual property except as expressly provided in any written agreement with Alfresco. The United States export control laws and regulations, including the Export Administration Regulations of the U.S. Department of Commerce, and other applicable laws and regulations apply to this documentation which prohibit the export or re-export of content, products, services, and technology to certain countries and persons. You agree to comply with all export laws, regulations and restrictions of the United States and any foreign agency or authority and assume sole responsibility for any such unauthorized exportation. You may not use this documentation if you are a competitor of Alfresco, except with Alfresco's prior written consent. In addition, you may not use the documentation for purposes of evaluating its functionality or for any competitive purposes. If you need technical support for this product, contact Customer Support by email at support@alfresco.com. If you have comments or suggestions about this documentation, contact us at training@alfresco.com.

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Introducing Alfresco

Introducing Alfresco
Why Alfresco In this introductory Element we examine why a system, such as Alfresco is required, and explore why you would use Alfresco as opposed to other content management systems or technologies. Well explore the different types of users and what kind of functionality they can look forward to using. Enterprise Content Management is defined and explored. Finally we will look at the different editions of Alfresco and how the product is distributed and supported. Alfresco is an Open Source Enterprise Content Management system that enables an organization to manage large volumes of content. The Alfresco system offers Document Management, Records Management, Web Content Services, rich collaboration between users and groups, powerful workflow and business process management.

The different Alfresco versions enable both small and large organizations to utilize the product. Alfresco Enterprise is typically deployed to medium and large organizations. Community is often used by those wishing to experiment and explore the functionality of Alfresco or use it within a non-production environment. Alfresco in the cloud extends the product range, enabling individuals and organizations to use the powerful Enterprise Content Management system in a fully hosted and managed environment. Alfresco offers content services such as metadata management, version control, workflow, search, renditions, aspects and many others give content a life and visibility which enables users to maximize its use. End users may experience Alfresco in distinct ways as they access and work with content. The product offers a robust set of infrastructure services enabling content to be accessed through an extensive range of protocols, products and user interfaces.

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Introducing Alfresco

End users At the simplest level Alfresco can present itself as a shared drive and users may not even realize they are using Alfresco as they create, edit and save documents. In addition to network drive based access protocols, web based access is achieved through Alfresco Share. Alongside this, direct access to the Alfresco content store can be achieved using productivity applications through the SharePoint protocol. Applications may also access Alfresco through WebDav, CMIS, FTP, CIFS and other protocols. Alfresco offers integration with Google Docs, enabling content of specific formats to be checked out of Alfresco, edited within that environment and saved back to Alfresco. Social publishing The landscape for the use and publishing of content has changed dramatically in recent years with social media becoming mainstream. Issues of control and management can arise for organizations due to the sheer ease-of-use and accessibility of these services. Alfresco has the ability to publish content directly to social media services. This introduces a range of benefits such as; centrally managed login credentials, establishing workflow, publishing history, linking posts and status updates to content.

Risk is reduced and the value of using social media sites can be fully realized. Within social networks content comes to life and visibility through trending, being liked and commented upon. Within Alfresco it is possible to follow individuals and the content they create, like content and post comments. Alongside many criteria it is possible to undertake search based upon popularity. Activity streams can also be viewed and filtered. Alfresco mobile The Open Source, iPhone and iPad application brings the power of Alfresco to mobile devices; enabling an Alfresco content repository to be accessed from anywhere at anytime.

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Introducing Alfresco

The application takes the user beyond a simple browsing experience which you might anticipate when using a mobile device. Functionality such as downloading content, local editing and uploading back to the repository is offered, alongside other powerful features which are found in Alfresco Share. For business Web Content Services manage the lifecycle of content, from production to publishing. Publishing through an Enterprise Content Management system provides a host of advantages over traditional publishing; such as transformation services, translation support, version control, workflow processes (such as review and approval), auditing and management of the process. Alongside the Web Quick Start functionality Alfresco offers integrations which partner content management with a range of technologies and products. Integrations with SAP, jive, Drupal and Liferay exist. In its application to business Alfresco is a broad solution which is not constrained to a particular vertical industry. Unique components can be deployed to satisfy business requirements. Alfresco is designed to scale (according to demand) and fit the needs of a range of business sizes. Alfresco supports the business through the implementation of business process management and workflow through the Activiti platform. The requirement of governance, risk management and compliance is satisfied through Alfrescos DoD 5015.02 certified Records Management module. For the developer For the developer Alfresco offers a fully featured content management platform. This simplifies the design and implementation of content management applications and bespoke customization of the system. Alfresco is built upon proven and robust industry standards such as; CMIS, REST, SOAP, Java and web based services.

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Introducing Alfresco

For IT services For the IT services department, Alfresco represents a high-value, lower cost alternative to closed proprietary systems. Alfresco supports a wide variety of platforms and technologies. It is written in 100% Java making it extremely portable and able to be fit into existing infrastructures.

The Alfresco architecture lends itself to working within a virtualized environment. Alfresco is a product that offers impressive performance and can be implemented as a high-availability system.

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Introducing Alfresco

Alfresco and open source Alfresco is Open Source making it transparent and fully extensible. Combining industry standards with an Open Source development model makes Alfresco significantly easier to integrate into business and technology environments. The strategy also enables Alfresco to offers its products at no licensing cost. Faster development time and wider innovation is possible since other Open Source technologies and solutions can be integrated into Alfresco. The Open Source community is diverse, vibrant and highly productive. Transparency of code enables peer review, which combined with Alfrescos extensive testing program leads to an extremely reliable and robust solution. Alfresco provides a full range of services, support, training, consulting and documentation. Since Alfresco does not charge for the software products it creates, the company is sustained and grown by providing a chargeable service infrastructure. This includes high quality follow the sun support, training and certification, consulting and a partner program. Despite being a commercial operation Alfresco still strongly contributes to the Open Source community. Examples include new platforms such as Spring and Surf and new projects such as Activiti. Alfresco editions Alfresco Community and Enterprise are classed as on-premise products, where an organization installs, configures and maintains the installation. Alfresco in the cloud is aimed at those wishing to utilize a fully managed and hosted Alfresco implementation. Lets explore the on-premise offerings in further detail.

Software releases With Community you have access to the very latest technology from Alfresco, but expect it to be bleeding edge, there are frequent releases and you have access to the source code through Subversion. Community edition has nightly builds with intermittent major releases. With the Enterprise edition you will find that there are more releases but no nightly builds, additionally each Enterprise release will go through a full quality assurance cycle.

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Development lifecycle Alfresco Enterprise is a unique code base from Alfresco Community and is a certified and warrantied binary. It has a differentiated development cycle and undergoes a rigorous quality assurance process to ensure stability, scalability and security. The quality assurance process initiates around five thousand tests for each and every supported technology stack.

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Introducing Alfresco

Audience Community is recommended for competent technical enthusiasts who are using the software in a non-critical environment. Community is also a good platform for Enterprise users who want to explore upcoming features. If you are organization or government looking for a robust production quality solution to deploy mission critical applications we recommend that you use the Enterprise edition. Support Alfresco Community offers support through the community, this is served by forums and a wiki. With the Enterprise edition you get a service level agreement (SLA) which matches your needs. This SLA provides you with access to Alfresco technical support team and allows you to log calls for product support and upgrades and track and manage issue escalation. In order to ensure that Alfresco Enterprise is as robust as it can be, a range of tests are run, which include functionality and regression tests and a full set of scalability and high-availability tests. Even with a robust testing scheme some bugs are inevitable. When you log a bug with the support team we track and fix bug those bugs and periodically produce service packs which are quality tested and address those issues. Licensing With either Community or Enterprise there is no licence charge, however Community offers support only through the forums whereas Enterprise provides worldwide multi-level support from a team of experts which can be purchased as a yearly subscription service. Enterprise service level agreements

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Enterprise customers have a choice of four contractual service level agreements, Gold, Platinum, Premier and Premier Advantage providing tailored levels of support all the way to follow-the-sun support.

Enterprise only tools Finally with the Enterprise edition there are a number of tools, which don't exist in Community, that are directly designed to help you administrate an Alfresco production system and provide significant value for an administrator. For example Enterprise provides Java Management Extensions which can support a variety of JMX consoles. This helps you monitor and run a production environment allowing you to plug Alfresco into your existing monitoring tools such as Hyperic and Tivoli. Although Alfresco Community edition can be clustered, the Enterprise edition provides for fast and easy clustering for system administrators.

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Introducing Alfresco

The Enterprise edition also introduces Kofax integration. With this you can front end the Alfresco ECM with the popular Kofax document capture and scanning product. Finally Enterprise edition provides the system administrator with the re-assurance that non-open source databases such Oracle are supported out of the box. What Alfresco is used for Used by diverse industries there exists a wide application of the Alfresco solution. Typical uses include; Document management. Collaboration for content development. Shared drive replacement. Portals and intranets. Web Content Management. Information publication. Records Managements. Case Management. Electronic post room. Image scanning and management. Invoicing. Knowledgebases. Case studies A growing range of companies and organisations use Alfresco.

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Activision is using Alfresco to manage content for a large range of customer web portals, centered on video game franchises. Implemented in six different languages they deliver a personalized one-to-one web experience for 5 million video gamers. Yellow pages implemented Alfresco to improve the speed, performance and user experience of its business search service, supporting over 20 million customer searches a month. The City of Denver consolidated 14 separate document management systems, including EMC Documentum and Microsoft SharePoint to Alfresco, reducing complexity, IT costs and increasing service to the public. KLM implemented Alfresco to meet Document Management needs of 30,000 employees and achieved a full roll out in just 6 months. North-West University in South Africa were able to leverage Alfrescos open and flexible architecture to overcome local telecommunications constraints as they consolidated their Enterprise Content Management system through Alfresco. Further information and detailed case studies can be found at alfresco.com/customers. Summary In this Alfresco Element, Enterprise Content Management has been explored. The benefits of using Alfresco, its functionality and the relationship with Open Source has been discussed. The different editions of Alfresco have been examined. This concludes the introductory Alfresco Element.

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